Your year is three lists, and the dates decide which year

List one is money received: each retained payout with its received date, the firm, the account behind it and the currency. List two is money paid: each charge with its date, the firm and what kind of charge it was. List three is the per-firm roll-up of the first two, so a single line shows what each firm returned against what it cost you.

A platform statement covers neither list. In a prop arrangement the firm owns the account and the trades, so your own cash facts are the payments that reached your bank and the fees that left it. Exporting a trade history and calling it the year's record gives you hundreds of filled orders and none of the six received payouts in the example below.

Day P&L still matters as evidence about how you trade. Keep it in its own file, where nobody mistakes a simulated equity curve for money that moved.

Every payout carries two dates doing different jobs. The requested date records when you asked. The received date records when the cash was actually yours. Income belongs to the year of the received date, which is why a request stamped 28 December can sit in the following year's list.

Logging one remembered "payout date" is where a year goes wrong. It also leaves nothing to correct against when a firm denies a request or claws a payment back afterwards: a single-date row keeps standing as cash that never arrived. Keep the request and the receipt in separate fields, then add the settled outcome when the firm gives you one.

Until a received date exists, the row is pending. It is counted and visible so you can chase it, and it stays out of the year's income while it waits.

Evaluation purchases are the charge everyone remembers. The ones that go missing are the rest of them, and they are the difference between a cost list you can defend and a number that looks too small.

Not every firm publishes an activation amount before you pass, so for some plans the charge that posts to your card is the only figure you will ever hold. Capture it the day it lands, with the firm and the date attached.

Two movements change your bank balance without being costs: money you add to your own trading pot, and money you withdraw from it. Both belong in the balance record and stay out of the cost list. Currency works the same way, a euro charge and a dollar charge stay in separate lists, because a converted total cannot be checked back against either statement once the rate you used is nowhere on the record.

• Resets bought mid-attempt, including the discounted ones bought during a sale.
• Monthly subscription renewals that keep billing after you stopped trading the account.
• The one-time activation charged after you pass, which arrives weeks after the entry fee.
• Platform, data or wire fees billed separately from the account itself.
• Charges on a second card or a second email, which never surface if you only check one.

A year-end export can only format what you logged, and four rules decide what reaches the files: income counts in the year of its received date, each currency gets its own section with no conversion, a blank price is an unknown rather than a zero, and a charge with no date is never assigned to a year at all.

Everything those rules exclude travels with the files instead of vanishing. A payout received during the year but held out of the income total (no funded-seat evidence behind it, an outcome of denied or clawed back, an amount that cannot be read, a currency that cannot be confirmed) is listed by date, firm and reason. Undated costs and accounts bought with no recorded price get the same treatment. In the example below, the four rows no statement could date appear in that not-included list while the other twenty-nine sit in the year's totals.

The files organize your own rows and stop there. How each item should be treated, and which records anyone is required to keep, is a judgment for the accountant reading them.